The Logic Behind Brand Collabs & The Metaverse’s Armory Show 🎨
Brands turn to mashups to attract new customers, and a KAWS show gets rave reviews from gamers (but not art critics)
Cultured is a newsletter by Otis that gets readers up to speed on the most interesting things going on at the intersection of finance, art, collectibles, NFTs, and more.
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🗞 STORIES OF THE DAY
Why are brand collabs so big right now?
Balmain x Barbie, Smeg x Dolce & Gabanna, Gucci × The North Face × Francis Bourgeois… Brand collabs used to be rare, but now everyone seems to be jumping on the trend.
When brands collaborate, they want to multiply their own exposure by reaching their collaborator’s audience (that might be why collabs are marked with an “x”). Older brands, especially ones down on their luck, will team up with hip brands to boost their image (we’re looking at you, Crocs).
Some of the best collabs come from so-called high-low pairings, which are increasingly popular in fashion. Retail brands with a large audience (Target, Uniqlo) will team up with designers, creating accessible fashion that generates hype.
Our Take: For collectors, brand collabs can be highly lucrative opportunities to get rare (and sometimes funny) mashup products.
While there are a few recurring collabs, many of the best brand pairings are one-off deals. The products they make are basically limited-edition supplies that will never be created again. As a result, the resale market for collabs is crazy. The intense hype around new drops and the market for good mashups mean that the brand collab trend is likely to stick around.
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KAWS’s London show gets panned by critics, but gamers on Fortnite love it
KAWS opened New Fiction, his first major solo show in London, this month at the iconic Serpentine Galleries. The show also opened on Fortnite for those who couldn’t make it to the UK.
The unique use of tech didn’t impress British critics — reviews of the show were uniformly bad. The Telegraph called it a “lost KAWS” (zero points for the bad pun), while another critic said it was “soul-crushingly boring”).
On Fortnite, the reception couldn’t have been more different. Gamers loved it, with younger Fortnite visitors saying the show got them into art. “I have become this die hard kaws fan. I'm dying to get my hands on some statues,” one fan wrote on Twitter.
Our Take: The KAWS show proves that combined metaverse/real world shows can get more people into art, even if the art isn’t critically acclaimed.
There’s a big difference between the KAWS show and the proliferation of NFT projects that have popped up across New York and Miami over the past few months. The NFT shows take something digital and present it in real life. KAWS, on the other hand, created something that exists in the real world and in the metaverse at the same time. By changing the format of the show slightly (adding skins and impossibly large sculpture in Fortnite), KAWS is pioneering a new way of combining the digital and physical worlds. With 400 million potential visitors on Fortnite, this could be the metaverse’s version of the Armory Show, the 20th century exhibition that brought modernism to America and changed our views on aesthetics in art.
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✨ AROUND THE INTERNET
A huge trove of Beatles memorabilia that once belonged to John Lennon is up for auction…as NFTs. The tokens come with a narration from Julian Lennon, John’s son, explaining the story of the item.
Are you enough of a spender to have an Amex Platinum? If so, you can now order them with unique designs from Kehinde Wiley and Julie Mehretu.
Picasso’s descendents are auctioning off NFTs of a never-exhibited ceramic made by the artist.
Melania Trump just auctioned off a hat she wore as First Lady for $250,000, but the crypto crash meant it sold for just $160,000.
The 1949 Buick Roadmaster driven by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man is going up for auction. The actor bought the car after filming wrapped and has held onto it for the past 30ish years.
A 1999 Serena Williams trading card just sold for $117,000 at auction, setting the record for the highest-selling women’s sports card.
YouTube’s CEO dropped hints earlier this week that the company plans to expand into NFTs. Other areas of interest: DAOs and crypto transactions.
Before he was a fashion designer, Virgil Abloh was a skater. When Surf Ghana was looking to open the country’s first skate park, it turned to Abloh (who is Ghanian-American) for help. After his death, the park has kept his passion for skate style and youth culture alive.
